Mac G5 PowerPC Update

Here's the specs on this project:
Mac G5 Tower, Dual PowerPC 2.7 GHz, 4.5 GB RAM, original 250 GB HD (vintage late 2005). Purchase price was $100 + shipping. Not bad, all things considered. The case was in good shape with very little signs of wear and just a bit of cleaning up to do inside to chase out the 10 years of dust bunnies. Since extra SATA II hard drives are so inexpensive on eBay, went with a second drive for installing the new OS. 

After much consideration, decided to proceed with installing the latest stable release of Debian "Jessie" (see previous post of the distributions in the running). Downloaded the ISO, burned to a DVD-R and read through the installation guide on PPC Luddite for some tips. 

First item to note, the resulting DVD was not a "Live" disc like what's popular now.  Booting from the DVD went right to business going through the steps for installation. Since this was a blank hard drive, selected the options to use the entire partition. Another option was which display manager to use (opted for kdm), and selected the Debian default, KDE and MATE desktops, just to have some variety. Other choices was lightdm for the display manager and GNOME, Xfce and LXDE for desktops - plenty to read up on and consider at the Debian Desktop HowTo page.

Second note, you'll be prompted to set the root password and then create an user account.  Remember those passwords! The user account does not automatically belong to the "sudo" group, so that's one of your first tasks after the installation. Read up on that here.

The results? A pretty sweet, massively powerful and elegant system! Seems to be some issues with the sound over the built-in speaker that needs additional research. More comments to come soon!

Ubuntu 14.04 Upgrade Bug

I upgraded one laptop with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS. Most of the process went pretty smoothly.  However, every software update after the upgrade complains about a failed install:
Calculating upgrade... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
38 not fully installed or removed.

For the sake of brevity, I won't post the entire string of error messages, but it boils down to errors encountered while processing: tex-common

Researching a bit leads me to this bug report - "package tex-common 4.04 failed to install/upgrade" - which proves to be interesting reading.  The issue is also listed on the TrustyTahr Release Notes under Known Issues.

Towards the bottom of the bug report a fix has been suggested (post #12). Also for users that know they have the tex-common package installed (appears to be pretty common), it is suggested to purge the package before the upgrade and then re-install (post #13).

Ah, the joys of upgrades!

Upgrading to Minecraft server 1.7.8

First time for everything: since I set up my Minecraft server on version 1.7.4, I've had to upgrade.  Guess a lot of changes were made partly because of the Heartbleed bug and the fact that Mojang is making some changes for the username changes that will be implemented soon.  Thus it jumped from 1.7.6-7-8 pretty quickly!

There wasn't much as far as instructions to be found, so here's a short list of what I had to do to get things running again.

1. Stopped the running version 1.7.4 server
2. Renamed the ops.txt file to ops.txt.bak
3. Renamed the user files in <minecraft root folder>/world/players from playername.dat to playername.dat.bak
4. Downloaded the newest .jar file for the Minecraft server using wget into the root folder (normally I'd link to that file, but that changes often)
5. Ran the script to start up the server using a new screen
6. Wait for the conversions to take place, then first thing from the server console op my username (otherwise, nobody has op status

Probably to be expected, once I connected to the server, I lost any inventory that I had previously.  Also noted, from other users that posted info about the upgrade, you will need to re-do any white-list you had created previously.

The ops file and white-list now are .json files that contain both the usernames and their new UUID.  Otherwise, things looked pretty much back to normal.

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4/14/2104

Addendum: Doing some more research, it looks like the user files should have upgraded automatically when server 1.7.8 was started for the first time.  I saw an error message stating that the conversion failed (and the server stopped).  That's why I renamed the user files and started over.

At the same time, there were reports that some of the Mojang services were having issues, including the service that would have done the conversion.

Conclusion, step 3 might not have been completely necessary.  User's inventory might have been preserved in the upgrade process, but I haven't seen anyone else post anything about that.

Ubuntu on Dell Inspiron 1420

Earlier I posted that I had installed Ubuntu on an old computer, but didn't really go into any detail about the hardware.  It's a 5 year old Dell Inspiron 1420 that was running with the original Windows Vista (service pack 2 installed).

This poor old laptop had a couple rounds of spyware/malware and was pretty buggy to the point no one wanted to even try to use any more.  Almost to the point of recycling it (or donating to a worthy cause), but thought why not install one of the new Linux distributions on it for fun.  Turns out it gave the old Dell a brand new lease on life!

With that said, I'd had some problems with the wireless drivers related to the hardware on this model, the Dell Wireless 1395 WLAN Mini-Card.  I had read previously about issues with proprietary drivers, etc.  Ubuntu connected via wireless without a hitch but I always had to manually reconnect the wireless after a reboot.  Researching showed several others having the same problem with 12.04 and recommended a different connection manager - wicd - but that caused more problems on the Dell because wireless broke all together.

Long story short, I put the default network-manager back and decided that the issue wasn't with Ubuntu but rather the drivers.   Still want to link to an article about an alternative for later:

Broadcom Wireless on Ubuntu